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Building the Ultimate Gaming Desktop
Alan writes "FiringSquad has just posted my Ultimate Gaming Desktop system building guide in which we take a no-budget but don't-waste-money approach. We even use an Athlon FX-57 in here. This is in fact only day one of a five-day series that will total over 32,000 words..." From the article: "Today's games aren't multithreaded. So, when designing a gaming system only one CPU core is needed. Therefore, the fastest individual core is going to be what's important for having the fastest frame rates and the fastest benchmarks. In real-life, when you're playing a game, your CPU still needs to spend time managing memory, the swap file, all while keeping your real-time anti-virus file scanner and firewall active. Everyone claims to run a clean system, but how many of us have been dropped out of a LAN game because we received an instant message?"
That is only true if you can assign certain .EXE to run on the 1st core. Then the game EXE to run on the 2nd core. While winXP does allow you to do that, there is too much debate as to whether XP separate jobs to different processors well enough.
Today's games aren't multithreaded. So, when designing a gaming system only one CPU core is needed. [...] In real-life, when you're playing a game, your CPU still needs to spend time managing memory, the swap file, all while keeping your real-time anti-virus file scanner and firewall active
Right, which is why multi-core or SMP machines are good for gamers: the extra work is running on the other core|CPU.
Trolling is a art,
Today's games aren't multithreaded.
Wrong.
All threads these days are multithreaded.
Not all are optimized to use multiprocessors. Hyperthreading, etc.
But every single game made today is using more than one thread. In my own quick and dirty games, I have one for graphics, one for collision detection/motion, one for input, one for network data in, one for network data out. That makes 5 in a highly simplistic game. Most games have far, far more.
Tepp
I don't know why firingsquad decided to cheese out and recommend an LCD, it's as important as the rest of the stuff they're suggesting they would buy.
IMO, LCD monitors have come a long way but they are not quite where they should be to be able to handle high motion video(games) and color reproduction. I would've suggested a high quality 19-21" CRT for the ultimate gaming rig.
After posting an ask slashdot about gaming LCD monitors, I took a plunge and bought one. I took my 17" DVI Samsung 710T back after realizing the flaws with the technology while trying it out for a days straight. It may look great in the store but give it a solid night of gaming / computing and you'll see all kinds of shit go wrong on the screen.
Suppose you have a single core that does 200 units of work every second, and a dual core where each core does 170 units of work per second. Suppose all of your background processes take up 2 units of work per second. This means your blazing single core has 198 units of work bandwidth per second for your single-threaded game. If your game has one core of the dual core system all to itself, then it only has 170, and the remaining 168 units of work-per-second bandwidth on your other core are unutilized.
Sure, games will become better able to use multiple cores in the future. But if you want the best possible gaming performance now, then the faster single core is the way to go.